


to make up for all the times i've been cheated on

by theseerasures



Category: Frozen (Disney Movies), Tangled (2010)
Genre: Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:35:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22834891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theseerasures/pseuds/theseerasures
Summary: For some reason it’s always her and Eugene who get sent off on the explore-y missions.Post-Frozen II: Anna explores Ahtohallan with Eugene, and without Elsa.
Relationships: Anna/Eugene Fitzherbert | Flynn Rider (Disney), Anna/Eugene Fitzherbert | Flynn Rider/Kristoff/Rapunzel (Disney)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [just this heart with much too much to share](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1139545) by [ProfessorSpork](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProfessorSpork/pseuds/ProfessorSpork). 



> Spiritual successor to Chapter 14 from my fic compilation, [measure your life](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1323370/chapters/3184235).
> 
> Now with author's commentary in second chapter! Please view as Entire Work to get endnotes to work.

[1]For some reason it’s always her and Eugene who get sent off on the explore-y missions.

Well, okay—that’s not really fair.[2] Anna's queen now, she’s the one in charge of all the sending. She wanted to come. Eugene just shares her sense of discovery, though Anna can tell from his exaggerated grunt as he lands ungracefully at the cave mouth next to her that it’s a dwindling resource.

She grabs him before he topples body first onto the next icy ramp. “You good?”

He huffs out an exasperated breath. “I’m way out of adventuring shape, obviously. Elsa couldn’t have raised those pillars closer to each other?”[3]

“She probably had other things to worry about,” Anna replies, quashing the guilt that immediately springs up at the mention of her sister. Elsa had agreed to stay behind and entertain Rapunzel in the Forest, but only reluctantly, and Anna had seen the brief flash of hurt on her face when they first mentioned that they wanted to go to Ahtohallan without her.[4]

It makes sense, though: if the spirits have been calmed and this place is really safe, then they should make sure that it’s actually safe for _everyone,_ not just ice-wielding fifth spirits with cavalier attitudes about what does and doesn’t count as mortal danger. And since Anna’s pretty much the “normal person” side of the bridge, she should be the one to go first. Even Elsa’s hyperactive big sister instinct had to eventually bow to that logic.

But…yeah. If Anna’s being honest with herself that’s not the only reason she wanted to come down here without her sister. Elsa has described the memory and magic that live down here a few times now, and always looks so transcendently happy when she talks about it that Anna’s worried that…well, that it won’t happen like that for her. Because of the no-magic thing.

And there’s a part of her that just doesn’t want to see it—any of it, because whatever awesome magic is down here, finding it…it wasn’t worth the cost. If she comes down here with Elsa and sees _everything_ -everything, then she might _say_ that, out loud, and she’s not ready for that conversation.

She's a little worried that makes her a bad sister.[5]

“Well, I don’t think staying here longer is going to let me recover the rest of my dignity,” Eugene announces. He holds out his left elbow and fires off a rakish grin: “Your Majesty.”[6]

She grins back and links their arms together. “Why, thank you.”

The rest of the descent isn’t too bad. They pass through a room with more standing pillars, but since those _aren’t_ jutting out of a bottomless pit (“Who built this place? Sadists?” Eugene grouses), it’s pretty easy to get across, and then…

Then they’re in the Dome.

Elsa’s told her all about the Dome: how the spirits had come to her, how she’d summoned Mother, who showed her the path forward, how she’d used her magic to give memory a form, a voice.

It’s all silent for Anna; silent and pitch dark.

She beats back the creeping sense of envy. This is what she _wanted_.[7]

Eugene lets out a low whistle as he makes a loop around the place, holding up his lamp to examine the curving walls. “This place…now _this_ would make an incredible lair.”

“I’m pretty sure it already is,” Anna replies absently as she begins her own circuit, “Elsa comes here all the time to…I dunno. She says she’s consulting the memories, but half the time I think it’s just to get out of camp cleaning duty.”

“Has she named it yet?”

“Eugene, it already has a name.”

“I don’t mean the name it came with. She should name it herself. Something snappy, like…” he sweeps his hand grandly out. “The _Ice Cave_.”[8]

Anna snorts so loudly the sound echoes throughout the room.

“Yeah, yeah, we’ll workshop it,” Eugene says. “You find the next entrance yet?”

“No, I—”

But then it’s right in front of her: a small triangular doorway, steps roughly cut from the ice.

She knows this part, too; teased and bullied details out of her sister until she had the full picture of what happened.[9] Beyond this threshold, an even bigger room echoing forever with the past, a slope plunging down and down until it stops at a ledge. A drop into the black.

Elsa died down there, alone.[10]

Anna hears Eugene approaching from behind. He’s quiet now, recognizes what this place is. They hadn’t needed to tell him much for him to understand.

There’s no reason for them to turn back now. They brought the necessary equipment to climb down, and there’s no place in Ahtohallan that Elsa hasn’t made safe—that was part of the deal that let the two of them come even this far. The cold in the deep that had frozen her sister solid had thawed when the dam burst. If Anna concentrates, she can hear the sound of rushing water below.

There won’t be any physical traces of Elsa down there. Just like there weren’t any of her own death, over the thawed fjord. Just like there weren’t any of Mother and Father, when they were swept away, not too far from where Anna is standing right now.

She doesn’t know how to not hate this place. Water might have memory, but that’s _all_ it has; everything else it washes away, so that there’s nothing even left to hold.[11]

Eugene takes her hands from where they’ve been clenched at her sides. He kisses her knuckles with a soft, knowing smile, until her harsh breathing subsides. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

Anna’s thinking of the thin scar under his ribs. Healing skin, despite all else.[12] “Why don’t you tell me?”

For a second he just looks over the abyss. “Kristoff,” he finally says. “He’d be upset that he didn’t get to talk our ear off about the ice stuff here.”

She wants to hug him, so she does. “You’re right. We should come back with him, do this last part together.”

He kisses her temple before they break apart. “Let’s go back to our family, huh?”

Anna takes one last look into Ahtohallan’s heart—the place holding all the answers, all the truth.

Then she looks away. “Yeah. Let’s.”[13]


	2. Endnotes

1Title taken from "Carry On" by fun. The one-shot from which this fic is based is probably one of my least favorite works. Even at the time I remember having a really rough time trying to make Rapunzel's voice distinct--or heck, even PRESENT, but what was worse was that the whole fic felt derivative and unfocused, so that most of it was just them hanging out but I also wanted it to be Deep and the result was, as usual, too many moving pieces for a sub-1k fic, particularly since I was juggling TWICE the number of characters I usually dealt with. I think it might have worked better as PART of a longer fic instead of a complete unit to itself, which made writing a sequel to it VERY appealing. This time around, it helped that the object of "exploring a space/the past strikes back" was OBVIOUSLY going to be Ahtohallan, a real place, instead of some vague inscrutable tunnel in the castle that I just decided to make up. I knew also that I was going to keep the focus tight, but actually cycled through a few combos--first it was going to be Kristoff and Rapunzel, then it was going to be Kristoff, Rapunzel, and Elsa--before ultimately realizing that the best option was actually to keep it as Anna and Eugene. It felt only fair, since I'd already written "come to terms" fics for both Kristoff and Elsa.[return to text]

2I struggled a LOT with whether to use this kind of verbal backspacing, particularly since "through whatever you've been" begins in the exact same way. One of the main things I've been working on during this Frozen Fandom Comeback Tour is cutting down Anna's narrational tics, both out of respect for her character development in the sequel and because I really think I'd gone WAY overboard with them during the days of the first movie. In the end I was able to justify it to myself, because "Anna has a slightly uncharitable emotion/Anna immediately backtracks from the emotion because it's WAY HARSH, MAN" ended up being the entire fic, and these first lines do a good job of foregrounding that.[return to text]

3Elsa made all of Ahtohallan safe to visit for normies! And by "normies" she obviously means "of Olympian physique and nobody else." I really do like the idea that Eugene has gone slightly to seed at this point; not REALLY out of shape, just...a little softer in places that hadn't been soft before by virtue of no longer being in perpetual mortal peril (uh, that I know of. I haven't seen any of Tangled the Series). He probably whines about being in his ~dotage at least twice a day whenever he visits Arendelle.[return to text]

4This conversation was VERY MUCH a team effort. I think the original plan was that Rapunzel would join them, but then Elsa had said "Yeah! I'd love to show you guys around" and then Anna had to break it to her that they...didn't actually want her to come. So Rapunzel ended up biting the bullet and made up some excuse about wanting to see Pascal hang out with Bruni so she could stay behind and keep an eye on Elsa in case she decided to sneak over to Ahtohallan after them anyway. I briefly toyed with cutting back to the Forest with Elsa and Rapunzel, just kinda...listlessly hanging out before having a muted conversation about what Anna and Eugene are doing and why Anna might have not wanted Elsa to come, all the while Pascal was goading Bruni into lighting bigger and bigger things on fire, but it felt like it would detract from Anna's pathos here, so I ended up not writing it.[return to text]

5I pictured this fic happening pretty soon after the resolution of Frozen II--maybe even before the epilogue. Anna probably sent a letter to Corona as soon as they got back to the tune of "How are you??? Elsa died but she's fine now and I'm queen, turns out our grandfather was a racist. Also Kristoff proposed!!" at which point Rapunzel and Eugene practically flew to Arendelle. Point being: this is the first time Anna's REALLY had time to process everything that happened, now that she has all the information and is literally at the place where it shook down. And there are a lot of things to process, but what bothers her is the feeling that she needs to do at least part of it AWAY from her sister. Anna's very solidly identified herself as "the sister who wants to talk about stuff" in the past few years. She's been trying her damndest to get Elsa to open up, and...now Elsa HAS, and SHE'S the one shying away from the hard topics? It's bound to give her a little bit of an existential crisis. As usual the fact that everything that happened also in some ways happened to HER so she's allowed to take some time with it is completely lost on her.[return to text]

6We all agree that whenever any of Anna's partners say "Your Majesty" it's a flirty sex thing, right? Right.[return to text]

7Whenever I use the word "want" in a Frozen fic I always picture the little pink whale with Susan Egan's voice in "Rose's Room": what _do_ you want, Anna? She wants a lot of contradictory things here. On the surface level it's of course "I want to non-magically explore this magical cave," but then what's up with the envy, or the worrying earlier that Ahtohallan won't like her because she doesn't have magic? She's having this moment where she's weirdly caught between WANTING to have magic (a want that I'd argue Anna never had before this) while being more wary of magic than she's ever been, because magic wasn't Worth It, because magic killed her entire family. And it's all coming from one place, which is that Anna still feels like she's losing Elsa, and not just in a PTSD-way. She's losing Elsa every time Elsa talks about something she can't see, or hear, or understand, every time Elsa does something she can't do. And magic is driving all of that; for the longest time Elsa buckled under the responsibility of having powers, and now she's ready to handle it, but that means Anna can't follow her anymore, and she's...just not ready for that. Not to talk about it, not even to think about it.[return to text]

8I spent some time hemming and hawing over whether Eugene's suggestion should sound cooler before deciding that whatever, it's not like the Batcave sounds any LESS stupid. Joking aside, I actually do think the idea of renaming is important, and Eugene obviously knows a lot about it. It's a way of rethinking something--reinventing a piece of the past so living with it becomes easier. That doesn't mean you should totally forget what came before--HE went back to being Eugene eventually, after all--but sometimes you need to give yourself that space so it doesn't drown you.[return to text]

9And the other thing with Anna being too hard on herself is that, well. Elsa's not really ready to talk about how she died either. She's much better at compartmentalizing her death from her magic, and the splendor of Ahtohallan, but the reason Anna's had to tease and bully the details out of THIS part is that in most of Elsa's voluntary retellings she has pages of purple prose about all the memories and sparkles before going "and then I died I guess but I'm fine now! You saved me!" I don't even know if she told Anna that she FROZE to death until a few conversations down the line, and part of it is because she's trying to ~spare Anna, who IS kind of dwelling on it to an unhealthy degree, but most of it is...not that.[return to text]

10This line was what kickstarted this whole fic, because I really think that it's the "alone" part that wigs Anna out the most. Because SHE'S died before, obviously, but she at least died surrounded by literally everyone she loved (and Hans. fuck that guy). But Elsa didn't have any of that when she died, and I'm sure it's crossed Anna's mind that if Elsa HADN'T thawed then it was likely that Anna would have never found her body, or any sign of where she'd gone at all. And Elsa seems OKAY with that (she's not, but Anna doesn't know), so...what's that supposed to mean? What does it say about how Elsa feels about Anna--about anyone in their family--that she'd be so okay with sacrificing all that?[return to text]

11I've talked a lot in these commentaries about my frustration with past-me's inability to have characters say what they mean. Obviously I don't mean that characters should just continuously vomit their unfiltered emotions at each other. I don't even think that characters have to consciously THINK what they mean all the time; not when half the time people in real life have no idea what they really mean. But I do think that there should be some kind of resolution, and I mean that in a very broad sense. Characters don't have to be definitively happier by the end, they don't have all sit in a circle and apologize and then sing kumbaya, but SOMETHING should feel clearer to both them and the reader by the end of the story, or else it just feels like we've been treading water this whole time. They don't have to act on the clarity, or articulate it, or use it to make them feel better--sometimes the clarity can make them feel worse--but they have to HAVE it. This fic is a good example of what I mean, because it's not like Anna DOESN'T spend most of her time here doing the Dance of the Seven Anxieties, but she does finally get somewhere. And it turns out that the crux of the issue isn't really that Elsa died, or that Elsa has magic and she doesn't, or even that she's losing Elsa; it's that Elsa might be losing her. Anna starved on the same table scraps that Elsa did for thirteen years, and that's how she knows that memories will never be enough. Even if you make them solid, that doesn't make them REAL, and that doesn't give them life. You can learn from the past, but you can't live on it, so the fact that Elsa not only dies for it but also keeps coming back here...well, maybe if Anna had magic she'd get it, but she doesn't, and she's starting to realize that maybe she doesn't WANT to get it. As resolutions go, it's kind of bleak, because it is crushing to so fundamentally disagree with someone you love, but Anna doesn't take it back here. Elsa made her choice, and now she's making hers.[return to text]

12Lest anyone thinks I've deluded myself into thinking that I'm completely over dense, inscrutable lines--there's this. In an earlier draft I had Anna feel oddly jealous in this moment of Eugene, because a scar, after all, is a definite sign that something is indeed past, and neither she nor Elsa ever got that with THEIR deaths. I cut it because it felt out of place this close to the end, and I actually kind of like the more positive (though vague) implication here, that through him she can take hope in their survival and healing.[return to text]

13I do think that there's something about Ahtohallan--its promise of certainty, of absolute meaning--that's alluring to EVERYONE, not just Elsa. Even more alluring is that, being solely preoccupied with the past, the dead, it can absolutely follow through on those promises. You really CAN know everything you want to know; all you have to do is put your own life on hold. Eugene and Anna both look into it at the end here, and their own deaths looked back. When Eugene says "we should come back later with Kristoff" and "let's go back to our family" it is in some ways a reprieve, an out for Anna so she doesn't have to suffer the whole place all at once, but I think it's a reminder of all the tough parts of going back to the real world, too: all the difficult conversations she has to have, all the uncertain eddies of life and love. It's all worth leaving this place for.[return to text]


End file.
